


Five Things That Never Happened to Ashley Williams

by Missy



Category: Evil Dead Series (1981 1987 1993)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-04
Updated: 2010-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-08 17:25:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five different things that never happened to Ash.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things That Never Happened to Ashley Williams

**Author's Note:**

> The five things that never happened to Ash: (1): The Evil Dead: The Evil was never unleashed, and is in fact entirely fictitious; (2): Evil Dead 2: The Evil was unleashed by Annie, not Ash; (3) Ash was never sucked into the past, Annie survived; Army of Darkness (4): Sheila never returned to the land of the living; (5) Ash never returned to the modern world and married Sheila in Medieval England.

_ I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)_   
_\- Sylvia Plath – Mad Girl's Love Song_

"Watcha writing?"

Cheryl doesn't bother looking up. "Your obituary," she tells her brother sweetly.

"Hilarious," he says, dry-voiced, sitting down on the porch swing and slamming it into the house.

"You're gonna wake up Shelley and Scotty." The two of them had passed out on the couch after a drinking binge the night before and probably wouldn't take too kindly to being woken up at six in the morning.

"Don't care if I do." Scotty had been particularly obnoxious that night, forcing Cheryl to hole up on the porch and Ash to take refuge with Linda in the back bedroom. Scotty and Shelly ended up sacked out on the sofa, toes pointed at the dawn, out like lights.

The memory makes her sigh and scribble again.

City children from birth, the ensuing quiet disturbs them both. Ash breaks it abruptly. "C'mon, Cher – tell me what you're doing."

 

Cheryl considers the merits of torturing her brother over this, but ultimately gives in. "It's a spec script."

Seconds after the words emerge from her mouth, she knows she'll need to explain herself. Ash is technically orientated but hopeless when it comes to the arts. "I'm writing a screenplay for my film theory class," she explains, thrusting the pile of pages into Ash's hands. "You can read it, I don't mind." She picks up her sketchpad and begins to scribble out the trees surrounding the cabin with surprising accuracy.

It takes Ash an hour to get all the way through the dialogue she's got down. When he's done, he says, with mild surprise, "vine rape. That's gonna get you kicked out of NOW."

Cheryl shrugs. "It's about making money, Ashley."

His brow furrows as she uses his full name. "There's another thing. Does the hero's name HAVE to be Ash?"

She smiles. "It's fitting."

"Why?"

"That's all that's left of him when the movie ends."

Ash scoots away from his sister. "You've got a sick, twisted mind, kid."

"Runs in the family," Cheryl says mildly. "Believe me, I know too well after sleeping next door to you and Linda all weekend."

He shifts uncomfortably on the swing. "Your choice to come, kid."

Cheryl doesn't know why she agreed to go in the first place – maybe for the peace and quiet, neither of which she'd managed to capture for very long. On the other hand, there isn't anything else to do in Dearborn in October, and her brother had promised her booze.

Which he finally chooses to deliver an hour before they're set to leave. "Don't tell mom I gave you that," he orders, sipping his own beer as the sun bleeds orange and gold light over the porch.

She gives him her best Mona Lisa smile. "I'm no tattletale, bro. I never told on you for decapitating all my Barbie dolls when you were five."

"That was an accident," Ash says. His smile tells her it wasn't, but she lets it slide.

"Ash?" Linda's standing the in doorway of the cabin, the keys to the Olds dangling from the tip of her right index finger. "I'm ready."

In a second, his attention is swallowed in the saccharine eclipse of Linda. Cheryl wonders when she'll find her own boyfriend, a figure worthy of worship to hang her arms around and moon over. The thought makes her pause, smirk - her peer councilor would have a field day trying to figure out what those vines are supposed to symbolize.

They're past the Smoky Mountains in a forced pit stop (the "hair of the dog" having not agreed with Scotty's stomach) when Ash wonders, "what're you calling that movie, anyway?" he turns around in the driver's seat and looks back at his sister.

"I call it," Cheryl says, with all of the drama due such an announcement, "The Evil Dead…"

***

_"Now when I was young my people taught me well. Give back what you take, or you'll go to hell."  
-Amy Ray, Jonas and Ezekiel_

His index finger hovered over the red button for a good five seconds. To press or not to press – to open up Pandora's Box or go meet Linda in the bedroom?

(He would later figure out when they were a year into couple's therapy this wasn't a very good harbinger for a lasting relationship).

"Cough." A word, instead of a sound, that makes him look over his shoulder. "I thought you were going to get me drunk and take advantage." She enters the room, seeming to float toward him in her white nightgown.

"Sorry, kid, I got distracted…"

She rolls her eyes. "You always get 'distracted'." Her brow furrows. "I'm starting to think you don't care, Ash…"

He rises up. "Of course I care, baby, I'm just a little…"

"Nervous?"

"Who, me? No!" He wipes his sweaty palms against his slacks to hide the evidence.

She sighs. "I didn't dreamed up that nooner we had in the stock room last week, darling."

Ash shrugs. "I know. Tonight feels different." He couldn't describe why, but it does.

The right corner of her mouth tips up in a smile. "C'mere," she encourages, grabbing him by the collar. "Let's go to bed…"

One hand on the woman, the other on the champagne, Ash allows himself to be dragged to bed.

By the time Annie arrives, they're long gone. Years later – when he's a professor of Engineering at Michigan State and has an ulcer, a mortgage and two children – Ash hears about what happened to her, and his skin will prickle with unfamiliar tension.

He'll blame it on the air conditioning and have another danish.

***

_"I've travelled with your ghost now for so many years. And I see you in the shadows of hotel rooms and headlights. You're coming up beside me whether it's day or night…"  
-Nanci Griffith, These Days in an Open Book_

They call him "The Stranger". He's the guy in the torn shirt who shows up, mops the floor with the undead, and leaves with the town's prettiest girl in his back seat.

His methods aren't what one would call 'neat'. In Holliston the extermination of a vampire coven leaves the town with a four thousand dollar cleaning bill. He leaves a crater in the side of the Lakehaven Mall while obliterating a rampaging Bigfoot. In spite of the damage he consistently wrecks, he is consistently forgiven, allowed to dispatch the wicked with his wits, gun and chainsaw.

Sometimes, they offer him a permanent position, but it's never enough to make him stay. None of the women are either, not that he goes for very long without companionship. He maintains to each one that it's all Just Sex, yet they fall for him, one by one, and he's left a trail of broken hearts the world over.

Better, he decided years ago, to have broken a heart than risked the stealing of a soul.

His sole attachment is an unwilling one; try as he may, he cannot shake Annie, whose letters and postcards find him no matter where he travels. She's in Egypt now, excavating the burial chamber of some dusty voodoo priestess.

He writes her back – shorts notes on barroom napkins, longer ones on motel stationary. He doesn't have a sister anymore, and she's the closest he'll ever get. But he won't risk sending them after her by making some horrible mistake.

None of the women who hover around him, however, can touch his heart. It's something, after all, you cannot give away twice.

When he dies, a necklace and a beat-up Oldsmobile are all he leaves behind.

***

_Fare thee well my bright star. It was a brief brilliant miracle dive.  
-Fare Thee Well – Emily Saliers_

"Should I…" Arthur began.

"No, lad," Henry The Red replied. "Leave him be."

They stared down from the battlement, at the dark-haired figure below, both filled with pity.

Ash sat on the cold ground, the corpse of his beloved spread out limply before him, her head in his lap. He ran his fingers through the hair of the Lady Sheila, unconcerned by the blood gathering on his palm, the wound staining the back of her head staunching itself uselessly against his skin. He would be covered in clotted blood when they came to take her body. If anyone dared to try.

He hummed as he rocked her in his arms, a tune that would not be written for hundreds of years.

_No one's gonna harm you. Not while I'm around…_

***

_"I **know.** I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I'm sophisticated!"  
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby _

The Williams was dead.

His daughter couldn't believe it. Her tall, strong, dark-haired father was dead. The words rattled emptily through her conscious as she knelt beside his funeral pyre. **Gone.**

It had been a brief illness – he had been rendered insensible by a fever that struck so violently the healers had no recourse in their treatment of him.

The day before his passing he had, embarrassingly, mistaken her for her mother.

"I told you it'd turn out all right, baby," he said, gripping her hand desperately. "I told you we'd be okay."

It had been a fine life – forty years of bliss lived beside her mother, seven children brought into the world (not one of them rendered limbless due to a demon attack), a kingdom that prospered beneath his governing. He had been happy here – as happy as a lost wanderer could be in a strange world.

Happy until her mother had departed the earth. It was cancer ten years before, and he made a desperate bid to drag her to his time for treatment, but the disease had spread beyond containment. He watched her wither, spent every day by her side as the end arrived, then lit the pyre at her funeral. His habitual grimness became gloominess, and he spent days riding the border after her loss, or raging at the castellans inhabiting Kandar. Understandably, he was never the same again.

She prayed that he had found release from the wicked, tormenting feelings that haunted his soul. That he had found her mother and Linda both and was lost in a confusion of feminine affection. That he could find rest at last. He was a difficult man but a good soul, and one that deserved the ease of a true rest.

She held a torch to the straw beneath his body, watching it crackle to life. He would not be afraid. As the daughter of The Williams, she will not be afraid.

An odd silence passed over the funeral cortege. It was pierced by the abrupt sound of a chainsaw revving.

"Christian, nay!" she called to her son, rushing to his rescue again. "Put it down! Ye'll lose a hand."

THE END


End file.
